Socials for Sale

Most of us know the internet isn't a particularly private place. Yet there's a certain feeling of anonymity that comes with sharing online — our words and stories mixed in with millions of others. It's easy to think no one is watching. But your data isn't just vulnerable to prying eyes. It's for sale. And the government is buying it up to keep a closer eye on you — and all of us. This week, hosts Amory and Ben take a chilling look at how our social media is used for surveillance with Dell Cameron, an investigative reporter with WIRED covering privacy and national security. ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team https://www.wired.com/story/ice-social-media-surveillance-24-7-contract/ (WIRED) Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html (The New York Times) ICE has spun a massive surveillance web. We talked to people caught in it https://www.npr.org/2026/03/04/nx-s1-5717031/ice-dhs-immigrants-surveillance-confrontation-deportation-mobile-fortify (NPR) To reach Endless Thread on Signal: 646-456-9095 This episode was written and produced by Kalyani Saxena and co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. It was edited by Dave Shaw and Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Marquis Neal

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Amory Sivertson?

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

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• 1:03Speaker 02

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:14Amory Sivertson?

  It was like something out of a spy thriller. An intrepid reporter got his hands on a government file.

• 1:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  You might be picturing vanilla, manila folder, classified, splashed across in a red stamp, all caps.

• 1:29Amory Sivertson?

  And you probably wouldn't be far off. The file did look particularly Hollywood-esque, at least to the reporter who saw it.

• 1:37Speaker 04

  It has like the person's name and residency and occupation. It's just, it's done up in a way that makes it seem like this person is a criminal and like they are gathering, you know, tons of intelligence on them.

• 1:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's Dell Cameron. He's an investigative reporter with Wired, covering privacy and national security. And he's telling us about the time he got his eyes on a document out of Washington State.

• 2:04Amory Sivertson?

  The document was created ahead of a No Kings rally there last year.

• 2:09Speaker 04

  This included something that they called, quote unquote, "a threat escalator" section. And it was built entirely around a single person who was a Harvard grad student living in Seattle. The document is sourced entirely to a TikTok video that she posted in the days before the event. And she's focused on kind of warning her viewers, you know, her audience about impending ICE raids in the Yakima Valley. And she's saying ICE, these ICE agents are domestic terrorists and should be dealt with like domestic terrorists.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  So that intrigued the police and they circulated a document to at least, you know, dozens of officers, probably hundreds in the area.

• 3:01Amory Sivertson?

  Dell got this particular file from Property of the People, a nonprofit dedicated to government transparency. It's what's known in law enforcement circles as a threat bulletin, and it had a lot of personal information about this Harvard graduate student.

• 3:17Speaker 04

  That page that they circulated, you know, included her name, her social media handle, where they believe she lived, you know, occupation, they lifted photographs of her from social media and from the video. And then interestingly, it kind of, it just characterizes her speech as spreading extremist ideology, attempting a call to action against a government entity and invoking fear and panic. And then it also, you know, it ultimately conceives that this person is not even likely to attend the protest itself.

• 3:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  And there was something else noteworthy about the file.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  The word threat is misspelled on this document. It's, it looks like someone attempted to put this thing together to make it look really professional, but in the end failed, you know, to some degree.

• 4:12Amory Sivertson?

  Dell told us it's not unusual for the quality of these threat bulletins to be quite poor. The information in them mined almost exclusively from social media can also be flimsy. Still, they're circulated to officials and the consequences of ending up in a document like this can be pretty severe.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  It could put you on the federal government's radar, or it could put you on the radar of your local police department. That is something that could potentially affect you if they. Add a little flag next to your name in some database or something. Maybe you get pulled over for a traffic stop and you you may not realize what's going on, but the officer is, you know, not treating you very well.

• 4:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  So when Dell saw this dossier like document about a private citizen built on a single social media post, it sent a tingle up his spine.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  That was probably the most insane instance of something like that I'd seen.

• 5:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Dell has seen some pretty insane things on his feed. As a reporter, he spends a lot of time parsing out the ways the government is watching us and gobbling up our social media data.

• 5:25Amory Sivertson?

  Most of us know that nothing we say online is really private. Still, the internet is a big place. There are millions of posts every day across TikTok, X, Facebook, Blue Sky, Threads, et cetera, et cetera. It's easy to feel like no one's really watching you specifically, unless you have a habit of going viral, of course.

• 5:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Most of us do not, right? Right? We're just yelling into the social media void? Well, Dell has some bad news for us.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  I don't want to tell anyone not to be on social media, but if you're using social media, you should assume that you should you should assume that the government can read that information at least.

• 6:07Amory Sivertson?

  It gets worse. It's not just that some government agent is scrolling through your feed. It's that all that data, your profile, mine, everyone's, has been scooped up and put on the marketplace as a product the government can buy in bulk and use for its own intelligence purposes.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  The truth is that like, the way that things are being architected now is that the social media companies or data brokers are really collecting information on everyone. And then the government can come along and run queries on that information.

• 6:45Amory Sivertson?

  The Trump administration is very interested in running queries on our online data. Here's just a sample of some of the contracts Dell told us about.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Palantir sits kind of at the center of all of this. There's a company called Zingle Labs. They Supposedly process like eight billion social media posts a day. Anytime you've posted a picture of your face online, there's companies like Clearview AI that are scraping those. They just got a $9.2 million ICE contract in September.

• 7:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  And boy, is that just the tip of the surveillance iceberg. I'm Ben, stop surveilling my data Brock Johnson.

• 7:26Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory, social media is a slippery slope, Sivertson.

• 7:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  And you're listening to Endless Threat.

• 7:32Amory Sivertson?

  Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR.

• 7:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Today's episode, socials for sale.

• 7:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, Amory, we know the government, more specifically, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE is watching and lurking on our social media data.

• 7:54Amory Sivertson?

  And the question is, what for?

• 7:58Speaker 04

  I mean, I think the mission is to deport as many brown people out of the country as possible. You have like ramped up quotas over at DHS, they're trying to like kick 3,000 people out of the country a day or arrest them and put them in these camps. So it's used towards that. I mean, it's also used to silence dissent. I mean, they're using it against protesters. That's very clear. And they are using it as well for its chilling effect.

• 8:29Amory Sivertson?

  Is the purpose to build this massively comprehensive database that just has you put in a name and it can tell you absolutely everything about a person? Or are they looking for certain key words, key sentiments, key threats?

• 8:49Speaker 04

  You can use it both ways. Like you can use, you can use a keyword search, maybe. To pull a list of people out of this database, or you can have like an individual that you want to investigate and put their name into it and pull out a ton of information about them.

• 9:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Put simply, the government can use our social media data to create lists of people to target, or it can build dossiers on people they're already targeting.

• 9:15Amory Sivertson?

  When it comes to identifying targets, one of the key tools DHS is using is facial recognition.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  If you are making comments online about the government that they don't like, which can be very benign, they may try to identify you. They have this face print. They know from that face print like which protest you were at, maybe like what time, location, things like that. They can put a name to a face and then they can move you into a derogatory, what they call like a derogatory list, which is just a watch list of people who they have no, they don't necessarily have any evidence that you've committed any crime, but you know, it's a secret watch list of the kind that the FBI has also run in the past.

• 10:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  So what kind of benign comment online might get you flagged? You know, just, just asking for a friend?

• 10:08Speaker 04

  The example that stands out most right now is anyone who is monitoring ICE activities. Like ICE is here, this is where they are. There was a lot of websites that people were circulating that were meant to like track ICE activity. There were apps, websites that had maps on them. This is where ICE activity was happening. That kind of stuff drove them absolutely crazy. And, you know, they were not willing to interpret it as citizens, you know, observing law enforcement activity legally.

• 10:51Amory Sivertson?

  So the government can watch you, but they don't like when you're watching them.

• 11:00Amory Sivertson?

  But let's go back to that facial recognition piece that Dell was talking about. Because according to his reporting, ICE agents out in the field will take pictures of people, and then they can see in real time if someone's face brings up a match in a database.

• 11:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  But there's a big problem with that. This isn't like running someone's fingerprints or driver's license through a database to see if they have a warrant or something. Dell says the facial recognition technology being used isn't entirely accurate, and the government knows it's not accurate, but it's getting used anyway.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  There's a high possibility that when they take a picture of someone, they're not going to get the right result. And what we've seen in litigation and court filings and testimony over and over is that it doesn't really matter. Like, they run the face once, they'll get no match. They'll try to run it again, they may get no match, and then they just arrest the person anyway.

• 12:01Amory Sivertson?

  DHS told NPR that the app they're using for these facial scans does not rely on open source media or social media. But that doesn't mean they're not using that data elsewhere.

• 12:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  This February, Dell reported on a contract between US Customs and Border Protection and a company called Clearview AI that would give officials access to billions of images scraped from the internet, including faces, for the tidy sum of $225,000 a year.

• 12:33Amory Sivertson?

  Which doesn't sound like that much money, actually.

• 12:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I mean, I basically pay that for my television subscriptions at this point.

• 12:43Amory Sivertson?

  So we know the government is interested in facial recognition as part of its anti-immigration agenda, even when that tech is less than perfect. But there's more. They're interested in our location data, too.

• 12:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  If the government can figure out where people are, it can use that information to better target them in immigration raids.

• 13:05Amory Sivertson?

  And they're going to use third-party contract analysts to do that work for them. Last year, Dell reported on ICE's plans to station nearly 30 private analysts at agency facilities in Vermont and Southern California.

• 13:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Those analysts would be tasked with one job: to scour our social media feeds and drum up new targets for immigration officials, relying heavily on artificial intelligence and commercial databases to get the job done.

• 13:33Amory Sivertson?

  The analysts are digging for posts where people might mention their location, like, "Hey, I'm at a party at this person's house," or "just grabbing a sweet treat from this coffee shop I love."

• 13:45Speaker 04

  They're looking through your posts, seeing what neighborhoods you're in. They build social maps, so you'll have a post from someone that was at a barbecue with someone else. And they try to collate that information to figure out where this person they're hunting is likely to be, who their friends are, who their family is. That way that they can narrow down the scope of what physical geographical location this person is likely to be in.

• 14:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Once the analysts have enough information about someone's location, Dell says they'll put a targeting package together and send it to an enforcement branch who can then carry out the raid.

• 14:24Amory Sivertson?

  Even if you're chronically offline and you and your friends don't generally post about your location, that location data still isn't safe from the government because it's for sale.

• 14:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Lots of apps on your phone collect location data, like the weather app. That data is usually used to advertise something to you, but the government can buy it too. And, well, it is.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  Basically, they're buying... Your location data from a data broker who is getting that location data from potentially your cell phone company is selling it. Or apps that you're using on your phone are collecting your location data and selling it to these data brokers. And then ICE is buying it. So they're buying a ton of that every day.

• 15:13Amory Sivertson?

  Technically, your location data shouldn't be easily available to the government. Thanks to a Supreme Court case from 2018, Carpenter v. United States.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  The Supreme Court ruled basically that like, location data was sensitive enough that it required a warrant. The way that the government gets around that now is by, instead of demanding it with the subpoena, they just pay the company to give them that data.

• 15:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you can't do it yourself, buy it from someone who can.

• 15:43Amory Sivertson?

  The government is still using subpoenas to try to get other information it's interested in. Like, for example, the email addresses and phone numbers of social media accounts criticizing ICE. That's according to reporting from the New York Times from this February.

• 15:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Social media companies don't always have to turn over the information, not right away at least. Except...

• 16:06Speaker 04

  So there's a lot of cooperation with industry to hand over this, especially if it's like financially lucrative for them to do that. The other kind of aspect of it is that as social media was really becoming a thing and the internet was kind of truly exploding through like the 2010s and into the last decade, these companies like Facebook and Google, Twitter would start getting flooded. I mean, they were just getting flooded with subpoenas and requests. And at some point, it just became advantageous for them to set up their own offices and kind of begin cooperating with law enforcement

• 16:47Speaker 04

  to help walk them through the process, maybe help them, tell them exactly where they, what they need to fill in to get the subpoena to go through.

• 16:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Something about that really like bothers me.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  It should.

• 16:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  It should, right?

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Like Twitter used to fight subpoenas, like before it was owned by Elon Musk. You know, that's Twitter deciding that it wants to spend money defending its users rather than comply with the request. So it's really up to the companies now. I mean, do you think Elon Musk is going to fight those subpoenas? The thing you kind of have to think about now is that most... Or nearly all of the major social media companies are also defense contractors or in bed in some way with the intelligence community.

• 17:36Amory Sivertson?

  We asked Dell for some examples of how social media companies are intertwined with the government, like X, now owned by XAI, which is owned by SpaceX, a major government contractor.

• 17:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  And then there's Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and WhatsApp. By its own admission, Meta has made its open source AI available for US government agencies, including the military and the intelligence community, to use.

• 18:04Amory Sivertson?

  And don't forget LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, another defense contractor. Microsoft has a whole page on its website dedicated to how their services can support US intelligence and defense.

• 18:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Man, it is getting a little cozy in this bed, Amory. Social media companies and the intelligence community all rolling around together. How is this a twin bed? Is it a queen? Is it a king? You know, I feel like everybody's poly, but are we actually conscious that we're poly in this bed right now?

• 18:37Amory Sivertson?

  I do not know, but I think it might be time to change the sheets. You know what I'm saying?

• 18:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, it's getting funky. In a minute, some of the consequences of this kind of surveillance and whether there's any remaining protections on our data in this brave new world.

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• 20:55Amory Sivertson?

  You know, Ben, sometimes when people talk about this kind of surveillance, there's this undercurrent of like, oh, well, the government says it's going after criminals, and I'm not a criminal, and I'm a US citizen. I don't have anything to hide, so it's fine.

• 21:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  But when the slope gets a little slippery for some people, it eventually gets real slippery for all people.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  If you want to see a slippery slope, last April, social media became a negative factor in the processing of immigration services. Social media became a negative factor in discretionary adjudication for antisemitism. So that's all tied back into the protests of the war in Gaza. And a few months later, in August, they added anti-Americanism, which is now, that's an overwhelmingly negative factor for immigration services processing.

• 21:57Amory Sivertson?

  And while the examples that privacy journalist Dell Cameron is talking about there involve how the government is treating immigrants who are already in the country, he says the overall approach here reminds him of another turbulent time in American history.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  You know, that really borrows from the Cold War era bar on communists and anarchists. There's a lot, there's a lot of parallels between kind of the McCarthy era, the use of red squads. What they didn't have in that era, you know, was the microchip. They had index cards that filled hundreds of cabinets where they would keep on people. They don't even need to build dossiers on people anymore, which is what they were doing in the 90s. And they have access to such vast databases all over that have all this information and collect it in one place that they can kind of hit a button and create a dossier on you at any time.

• 22:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's like more powerful and less accurate.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  It's less accurate and there's no way for you to really contest what it says or possibly even know that it exists. But you can't, you know, you can't contest the inaccurate information in the dossier that the government is using to make decisions about how it's going to treat you.

• 23:16Amory Sivertson?

  When we think about right now, what can't ICE do?

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, they can do almost everything. The things that are really protected are the contents of your messages, texts and conversations. That receives the most protection and it receives even more protection if it's in transit, if they're trying to intercept that information live, if they're trying to wiretap you. Everything else can be bought and sold, basically.

• 23:49Amory Sivertson?

  So your text messages and DMs, probably safe. Anything else you post, probably not.

• 23:59Amory Sivertson?

  So there were some people who were in charge of making sure the government was using these tools in a way that didn't violate privacy.

• 24:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Small itty bitty problem, though.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  One of the things kind of you have to recall is that like in March 2025, that's when the reduction in force notices went out. That gutted, for instance, the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which was the body that handled complaints about facial recognition in particular, and social media monitoring abuses. There were also, you know, significant changes to the privacy offices inside of DHS.

• 24:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emery, I think anybody who's, you know, reasonably aware of everything that has happened since Edward Snowden assumes that there's a certain amount of just broad surveillance happening of Americans and people living in America, whatever their citizenship status is, all the time, right? But we're entering into this world where the government is outsourcing a ton of that work to algorithms and private companies. And the work is both bigger and broader than it's ever been. You know, we're outsourcing it outside of the government. We're outsourcing it outside of humans.

• 25:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  But the implications feel very dystopian and also very personal. They feel like the impact of this stuff is extremely personal and potentially traumatic. And that worries me.

• 25:38Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of what Dell is reporting on feels like the fine print of being an American in 2026. And a lot of people have been feeling the sort of like fine print vibe for a long time. You know, being an American is not the same from person to person, but now we're becoming more aware, at least I hope we're becoming more aware, of the ways in which we're being surveilled that we didn't even know was legal. And it feels like the rules are suddenly changing right under our feet.

• 26:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're basically weaponizing data in new ways. And we're doing it with way less.

• 26:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oversight from government watchdogs that are supposed to protect us from government overreach.

• 26:28Amory Sivertson?

  But there are some people still watching. There's Dell, who spends every day swimming in this stuff, which we realized is actually kind of a vulnerable thing. Yeah. Do you worry for yourself at all covering, covering this particular issue?

• 26:45Speaker 04

  You know, I, I, I don't want to be vain and think like, the government is spying on me specifically like, oh, man, they must have read that thing I wrote last week. I bet they're really mad and they're listening to my phone calls, but, you know, they don't necessarily have to, I mean, the, the targeting doesn't have to be that specific. I think that they can, the technology, I mean, AI in particular, the technology is there now where it doesn't necessarily require a lot of people sitting around like thinking about you.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  You know, they can make a list of journalists and run that through a system and pull out whatever information they want. They're not supposed to. There's supposed to be someone there that says, no, you can't do that. But they mostly fired all of those people. So, yeah, I mean, I definitely worry about it. And certainly, and in every case, if I'm dealing with like a source, like we're using the utmost protection possible.

• 27:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  What does that look like? Is it like signal chats and whatnot?

• 27:53Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, certainly Signal is kind of the bar for encrypted communications. It's what I think most journalists use. There are other tools, but end to end encryption is a must. And then, I mean, but i- in some cases, it looks like, you know, getting on a plane and flying and sitting in a cafe and meeting someone.

• 28:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  Which is very, you know, it sounds a little James Bond, but if you have a source and they're, you know, scared and they have a right to be scared, it can look like that.

• 28:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Dell says, if we want things to get better, maybe they have to get worse first.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  You have to ask yourself whether you want your children growing up in a neighborhood where every time they go outside, they feel like they're being photographed or even recorded. I don't think that that's like the place that people want to live. I think we're trapped. I don't, you know, people use the like 1984 metaphor a lot, but it doesn't necessarily apply because to some degree, we are doing this to ourselves. We're buying this technology. We're normalizing it every day. In order to participate in society, you have to, you now have to make yourself vulnerable to the state's surveillance.

• 29:09Speaker 04

  I think the rampant abuse of it that we're seeing may accelerate the amount of pushback to it that could, you know, it could result now in some, in some laws.

• 29:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  So what do you think, Gamery? More laws? Should we have that?

• 29:30Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, I think, I think that's a piece of the puzzle of what maybe needs to happen here because I, I don't have much faith that tech companies are going to regulate themselves either.

• 29:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  No?

• 29:41Amory Sivertson?

  But, no, no, I don't. But I guess my silver lining is, is Dell's reporting, knowing that there is someone out there talking about what's happening, even when government oversight itself is falling short.

• 29:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm. Major headline, journalist thinks that journalists are important?

• 30:04Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm, I'm.

• 30:05Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, I do.

• 30:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  I do too. I do too. The point is well taken that our world is kind of like built around this stuff at this point in a really complicated way. So you can't just like necessarily, well, you can technically go and live in the woods and never, never engage with it. But, you know, eventually it's possible also that people will just opt out of a lot of this stuff and, and not check that I agree box, not sign the ULA, the end user license agreement. And, and, you know, we have that individual power to not sign it and we have collective power in a bunch of us not signing it and not signing up for this stuff in a

• 30:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  way that sort of changes the economy of how this stuff works and removes it as a tool that's useful for the government.

• 30:55Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah. Yeah. It'd be hard for me to opt out of the weather app, but. Less hard for me to opt out of social media. It is possible, just saying. And who knows, maybe eventually just the awareness of the ways in which we are being surveilled could translate into some real changes of behavior and real change overall. Or at least something that makes our privacy seem less like fine print and more like something that can't be negotiated or sold.

• 31:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I'm looking forward to Signal releasing its weather wrap. Can't wait.

• 31:33Amory Sivertson?

  We're waiting.

• 31:40Amory Sivertson?

  One more note before we go. We asked the Department of Homeland Security a bunch of questions, including how the government uses social media data, how agents use facial recognition technology in the field, and we put the criticism to them that this enforcement is having a chilling effect on dissent.

• 31:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  While the agency didn't answer any of those questions directly, a spokesperson did write back to say DHS wouldn't, quote, "confirm or deny law enforcement capabilities or methods," unquote, adding, quote, "DHS law enforcement methods abide by the US Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment."

• 32:20Amory Sivertson?

  And speaking of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled in late June that people have a, quote, "reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to smartphone location data." The opinion came in a case about geo-fencing, when law enforcement asks tech companies for information about all the people whose phones were near a particular crime scene. That case was kicked back to a lower court, and you better believe we are going to be watching where that goes, so stay tuned.

• 32:52Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Kalyani Saxena. It was co-hosted by me, Amory Sivertson.

• 33:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  And me, Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Dave Shaw and Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Marquise Neal.

• 33:08Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Emily Jankowski, Grace Tatter, our production manager, Paul Vikes, and managing producer, Sumit Joshi.

• 33:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between using the weather app for forecasts and using the weather app for surveillance.

• 33:23Amory Sivertson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up, [email protected]. And we figured we should also remind you, if you have a story that you want to share more discreetly, we are on signal. That number is 646-456-9095. Again, 646-456-9095. You can also find that in our show notes.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 34:40Speaker 07

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 34:41Speaker 06

  Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 35:31Speaker 07

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• 36:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.